THE DAM HAS BROKEN

While it is rewarding to have written some social and

political criticism that was Spot On, I find it
puzzling and a little aggravating that it has taken so
long for others to come to see and understand more of
our current political morass and weakened efforts.

I offer the following from George Stiners work: THE
DEATH OF TRAGEDY, in the hope that we will
mine the depths of truths so essential to our freedoms.
EXCERPTS FROM:

THE DEATH OF TRAGEDY
BY
GEORGE STINER

Words carry us forward toward ideological
confrontations from which there is no retreat. This is
the root tragedy of politics. Slogans, clichs,
rhetorical abstractions, false antitheses come to
possess the mind (the Thousand Year Reich,
Unconditional Surrender, the class war). Political
conduct is no longer spontaneous or responsive to
reality. It freezes around a core of dead rhetoric.
Instead of making politics dubious and provisional in
the manner of Montaigne (who knew that principles
are endurable only when they are tentative), language
encloses politicians in the blindness of certainty or the
illusion of justice. The life of the mind is narrowed or
arrested by the weight of its eloquence. Instead of
becoming masters of language, we become its
servants. And that is the damnation of politics.
Corneile knew exactly how this process takes place.
No dramatist is his equal in rendering the feel, the
complication, and the cancerous vitality of political
conflict. Only Tacitus can rival Corneille in showing
how men are embedded in the constricting, mind-
clouding matter of political circumstance.

the characters assume abstract positions and abide
by them to the point of ruin. Their free will is
mastered and corrupted by political rhetoric.

The evil of politics lies precisely in this separation
of the human person from the abstract cause or the
strategic necessity.

When rulers begin talking of streams and
things, humanity has lapsed from both their
language and their intent.

* * *

This attends to the politics of a Supreme Court and
to the men and women who have sworn to uphold the
founding documents of this noble republic. These
documents are some of the finest ever produced by
the mind, heart, and hand of the species called
Humankind. We trifle at the peril of losing their
significance and the freedoms of our souls.

Don Davison